Placeling
At Placeling our belief is that you should be the guide to your world. We’ve built our iPhone app, website and blog tools to help you easily share your unique experiences.
Today we’re announcing three more ways we can help.
1. Embed your map in your blog/website
You can now take your Placeling map and embed it in your blog/website (here’s an example).
If you’re a blogger, this lets your readers explore your blog via a map - each of those pins can include a link to a page on your blog.
2. Create Your Own Places
We’ve got a great database of places across the world, but we know that there are lots more that you want to tell people about.
So today we’re making it possible for you to add your own places to Placeling and let them know about those special places that make your world so interesting. Like this one.
How do you add a place?
Just perform a search. If we don’t show you the place you’re looking for, you can add it:
3. A blog footer putting you at the center
We’ve redesigned our blog footer to feature you.
If someone clicks on that map they’ll go to your map, centered on that pin with the info window of that place open. Ditto if they click on “See your places”:
Let us know what you think of the new features and if there are other ways we can help you share your world.
To celebrate the launch of our WordPress plugin - which turns your blog into an iPhone-enabled city guide - we’ve got a sweet contest (bad pun intended).
Simply guess the number of jelly beans in the jar below.
The winner gets…the jar full of jelly beans! We’ll ship it anywhere in continental North America (you can still enter the contest if you don’t live there, but you’ll have to send it to a more local friend).
How To Enter:
- Tweet this post with the “tweet” button below and replace the “N” with your guess:Tweet
- Follow us to be notified of the winner and check out all the fun, non-jelly bean-related stuff we’re building: Follow @placeling
The Rules:
- Contest closes at 6pm (Pacific time) on Friday March 30th, 2012
- Shipping address must be in continental North America
- In the event of ties, the first account to tweet the closest number wins
- If you tweet multiple guesses, we’ll take your last tweet as your official guess
At Placeling, we love blogging. Blogging gives each of us a voice and lets us share what we’ve got to say with the rest of the world.
An incredible share of blogging is devoted to locations:
- Foodies talk about restaurants they love
- Travellers write about places they’ve visited
- Parents talk about places that are perfect for families
But all of these local stories suffer from the same problem: you can walk right past a place recommended by your favourite blogger and never know it.
Because there’s never been a way to see nearby blog posts on your iPhone.
Until now.
Today we’re launching Placeling’s Wordpress plugin.
You write blog posts just like you’re used to, and with one simple step, they go to Placeling and you can see them on a map on your iPhone.
Here’s an example.
The other weekend one half of team Placeling went to the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver to see their exhibit on Guo Fengyi. He loved it and blogged about it.
Now it’s on his blog…
…and if you walk by you can see it in the Placeling iPhone app (that “More on Web” link goes to his blog)…
…and if you explore his Placeling map, you’ll see a pin for the Contemporary Art Gallery with a link to the blog post.
And this took only two extra clicks.
Let us show you how.
The Placeling plugin puts a little marker next to where you upload photos:
Click it, and up comes a search box showing places you’ve recently bookmarked using Placeling (you’ll need to create a free account at Placeling in order to use the plugin). Pick one of them or use the search box to add a different place (as you type, the locations will update):
When you click on one, you’ll see a preview of a footer we put at the bottom of your blog post:
That footer will link to your Placeling account and also let users learn more about this location.
Click “save” and then write your blog post.
The Placeling plugin shows you a map and the place you’ve written about; you need to add a short summary that will appear on Placeling:
When you publish, the summary, a link to your blog and any photos in the post will be sent to Placeling.
How easy was that? And now your blog is an iPhone-based city guide.
Yesterday we released a new version of Placeling. We added four features that’ll make your city more interesting - and that you can’t get anywhere else.
We think that anywhere you go you should be able to see the world from three different views: your places vs. those of people you follow vs. popular places. We’ve built this into our “My Map” feature; now it’s one tap to see what others know nearby:
Wondering who specifically knows something nearby? Just tap the filter button to see who’s got places nearby and highlight an individual’s places:
Can’t remember the name of that restaurant you went to last weekend near Kits Beach? Just keep zooming in on the map and the ability to placemark a location will pop up. You can now placemark from a map:
And if you don’t like maps, switch between maps and lists. Any map can be switched a list or vice versa - just hit the button in the upper right corner:
Give it a try and let us know what you think. All of these features were suggested by our users; if you tell us how to make your city more fun, we’ll build it.
